Home from the range

A large number of pre-historic artefacts stolen from a Maadi storehouse have returned to Egypt, as Nevine El-Aref reports

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After touring around various American states, 79 pre-dynastic artefacts, including plain stone reliefs, ceramic and alabaster pots, and jewellery made of shells, is back home. The items are now being restored at the Egyptian Museum laboratory with a view to being placed on display at the museum's temporary exhibition hall before they are taken back to the Maadi storehouse from where they were taken six years ago.

The artefacts were handed over to the Egyptian consul-general in New York, Hussein Mubarak, at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's New York office.

"When [the military officer] stole these items from Egypt, he robbed a nation of part of its history," Peter J Smith, head of the New York customs office, was quoted as saying. "The repatriation of the Maadi artefacts reunites the people of Egypt with an important piece of their cultural heritage."

Edward George Johnson, a chief warrant officer from Fayetteville, NC, was arrested in February in Alabama on charges of transportation of stolen property and wire fraud.

Johnson was deployed in Cairo in September 2002 when approximately 370 pre-dynastic artefacts were stolen from the Maadi Museum. In January 2003 he contacted an art dealer about the sale of some of the items.

The dealer bought about 79 pieces for $20,000 after Johnson said his grandfather had acquired the antiquities while working in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the items were later consigned to galleries in Manhattan, London, Zurich and Montreal, among other places.

Egyptian and American archaeological experts determined that the items he was trying to sell came from the museum in Maadi.

Johnson pleaded guilty in July to possessing and selling stolen antiquities and was sentenced to 18 months probation.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said that the pieces were originally excavated from the Maadi site in the 1930s and were stolen in 2002 from the storehouse, which was run by the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University.